[Ed. note: It’s a tradition in these pages to begin offering up our best predictions for the new year in December. Today, James gives his off-the-cuff 2023 predictions in anticipation of a mega Altucher’s Investment Network 2023 prediction issue. Read on.]

10 Predictions for 2023

James Altucher

1. Economy and Stock Market

The Fed raised rates in a death-choke manner on the economy. Recession by second half. You will know it's a recession when inflation is lower and unemployment is higher and profits are way down.

But the stock market doesn't follow recessions. I think the usual pattern for bear markets will hold. The market will go up the next few months. Dip end of January to early March, and then rise up the rest of the year as it becomes clear the recession will cause the Fed to ultimately cut rates.

2. Crypto market

The next catalysts will hit:

- regulation to prevent FTX-es

- stock market will go up

- more use cases will become clear

- Fidelity will allow users to start buying Ethereum and bitcoin.

Bitcoin and Ethereum back to all time highs.

- crypto will dominate supply chain management

Central Bank Digital Currencies will start to become a real thing.

3. Russia / Ukraine

The war will enter a stage of prolonged standstill without anyone making progress.

4. Twitter:

Elon Musk will show that he has more users than ever. And the first rumblings of Twitter as a crypto payment platform will begin.

5. 2024 elections in 2023.

Republicans: As expected it will be a DeSantis vs Trump battle with Nikki Haley running to get a VP spot and Pence running but failing.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Trump get more traction than the media is expecting.

Democrats: Joe Biden will keep saying he's running but he won't. It will be Gavin Newsome, Kamala, Buttigieg.

Surprises: I bet we see legit independent efforts from Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Liz Cheney.

6. Oil prices

Through the roof. Nobody seems to be taking into account that the largest consumer of oil (the US) has depleted almost all of its strategic reserves.

7. Kim Kardashian

Will date a completely non-famous person.

8. Tech

- Solar will start to become viable for powering your house.

- Genomics will start curing cancer

- Online learning in simulated realities will become a thing

- Supply chains will be tracked by crypto

- A major shift from China as our supplier as the US brings manufacturing to the US with the use of Robots like Tesla's Optimus.

- The Metaverse will be more about current popular games that go crypto rather than games built from scratch that currently exist. Microsoft will become the dominant player in the Metaverse among big companies.

- Cloud storage companies will boom as streaming and virtual realities and data analytics become more important

9. Predictions on predictions

More people will continue to predict the world will end in ten years.

Since 1830, people have been predicting, "the world has ten years left" and that trend is only rising.

10. And I will hit a chess rating of 2300!

Hopefully in Q1.